This must be one of the slickest web sites ever: http://www.taptaptap.com/#convert

And this app - Convert - has the best UI I have ever witnessed on an iPhone.

Bill Gates is famous for having said we will never need more than 640KB RAM on a personal computer. However if you ask someone today whether say 18GB of RAM is enough for a development workstation, what do you think the answer would be?

I am sure most people would argue even if you run 3 VM's each using 2GB RAM, and an IDE and mail and browsers and Word and whatever, you will not easily exceed 10GB of RAM. So it should be more than enough.

Well - here is the problem. I have 18GB RAM. I regularly exceed that limit and start swapping like mad even if I only have 2 VM's open - each using 2GB of RAM, IntelliJ, several small apps. The reason? Nobody can write leak free code. Not Microsoft, not Apple, not the people behind OSS software. Applications, kernels, drivers - they all leak eventually. So the question becomes not whether x GB of RAM is enough, but rather how long uptime can I achieve with a given amount of RAM. I found that I cannot exceed 27 days of uptime before I have to reboot to reset all the leaks. This is on my Mac Pro 8 core.

It took me a full 10 minutes to track down this stupid bug. It is not intuitive. I guess it is the penalty one pays for terseness:

vCostEntry.getCost().put(vDBField, Utils.makeProperString(vExportToExcel).equals("DISCOUNT")?((int)Utils.getDouble(vRawAmount)):GetIntFromFormattedCurrency(vRawAmount));

Some definitions to explain above:

This is official. The past 365 days I have spent in Canada mark both the coldest weather I have ever experienced at -35C (this was a few days after the screenshot I took below) with windchill at -42C:

to the past week's temperatures of 38C (humidity index of 43C):

I have been struggling on and off with EasyFrom DBConvert converting a Paradox 4 database to MySQL. I would get this error intermittently:

[800A0CB3] Object or provider is not capable of performing requested operation.

The weird thing is I'll work just fine the one day, then the next I get that error. So I finally tracked it down - two main causes. The first is the Collation scheme - my paradox files uses International scheme, for some reason sometimes my system default gets reset to ASCII.